Dropping to crop mode negates the whole point of the K-1: 36MP and full-frame field of view.

The K-1 gives you lots of options, features and capabilities to do a whole range of useful things at a great price point. That's the real point of the K-1. I never use GPS or Astro-tracer or even video, but they are useful options to have.

Crop mode is one of those options. It's very useful indeed and I use it a lot when event shooting to give me more lens reach, or boost fps, as needed. The 'Crop' option is etched on the function dial for a good reason.

Dropping to crop mode negates the whole point of the K-1: 36MP and full-frame field of view. Seriously, if Ricoh needed a new logic board for the K-1 ii anyway, why didn't they add extra buffer?

It's not the buffer that is the problem. The bottle neck is the SD card slots UHS-I speed that is the problem. The K-1 files are to large for UHS-I to handle them. It's really simple math. The 50+mb RAW files can not transfer fast enough through the 40mb/s UHS-I throughput speeds.

Buffering is a valid complaint, and something I would like to see improved in successive Pentax releases.

Certainly agree, of course. Improvements are always welcome. I was just pointing out that sometimes you have to adjust your technique to match the equipment you have. On the K-1 if you mash the button down you will fill the buffer. If you slow just a bit and actually shoot pictures instead of spray & pray you can go quite a while without buffer issues. Perhaps that is not what one WANTS to do but it is what one NEEDS to do to make the K-1 work in that situation.
The other alternative would be to switch to crop mode if you know you are going to fill the buffer and need to just mash the shutter button. Not ideal but there are ways around this perceived limitation.

I think the buffer topic is somewhat a result of dogmatic user views wrt JPG.

If you shoot really many shots in a row it is what I call "snapshots", because the whole reason is you do not really know what will be on the picture. Fine.
Then if I have a use case for anything like this, I switch to JPG *. I dont see the end of the buffer then prior to something like 70 shots. One image file is only about 5 MB, so the buffer clears 4-5 images per second of pausing. I assume basically noone will ever hit this limit.
JPG is really only limited in white balance and strong exposure corrections. So maybe for stage lighting conditions that is limiting, but most everywhere else in snapshot country? Certainly not an issue for sports or most of wildlife.
To put it simple: I see the real value of Raw only in very mixed strong artificial lighting situations and landscape or similar shots where you have extreme dynamic range. But landscape is not snapshot territory.

I think its fine when people want everything more, but the actual "limitations" tend to be very much niche or self inflicted scenarios. Not the "I could not get the shot" type.

Set up a nice JPG setting for later PP in a user mode and all this should be fine for many/most.

---------- Post added 20th Mar 2018 at 16:57 ----------

Originally posted by monochrome

Actually, the problem is the lens

In my experience any screw driven lenses are bad for continuous shooting with tracking z-axis movement.
I think the camera AF prediction works fine, and even the simple drive speed of screw drive might be looking good, but the whole acceleratioon/deceleration thing with fine adjustments is not what screwdrive is good for. Part of it is (I guess) the sum of clearances in the whole gears involved then.

I am confident that you'd have much more sucess with a modern ring SDM lens such as a DFA 24-70.

In my experience any screw driven lenses are bad for continuous shooting with tracking z-axis movement.

I had never thought of it quite this way but I think you are right. Case in point is the Pentax-F 70-210. When you press the AF button it goes "whirrrr.......BANG". Locked on and usually quite accurate. But doing that in continuous AF? Not pretty.

I had never thought of it quite this way but I think you are right. Case in point is the Pentax-F 70-210. When you press the AF button it goes "whirrrr.......BANG". Locked on and usually quite accurate. But doing that in continuous AF? Not pretty.

Exactly what the FA43 I wrote about did on the stationary shots (and what I would expect). Sometimes it did the BANG - aaaaaadjust like the old days, but that was in variable light at the dark end of a room.

I think the buffer topic is somewhat a result of dogmatic user views wrt JPG.

If you shoot really many shots in a row it is what I call "snapshots", because the whole reason is you do not really know what will be on the picture. Fine.
Then if I have a use case for anything like this, I switch to JPG *. I dont see the end of the buffer then prior to something like 70 shots. One image file is only about 5 MB, so the buffer clears 4-5 images per second of pausing. I assume basically noone will ever hit this limit.
JPG is really only limited in white balance and strong exposure corrections. So maybe for stage lighting conditions that is limiting, but most everywhere else in snapshot country? Certainly not an issue for sports or most of wildlife.
To put it simple: I see the real value of Raw only in very mixed strong artificial lighting situations and landscape or similar shots where you have extreme dynamic range. But landscape is not snapshot territory.

I think its fine when people want everything more, but the actual "limitations" tend to be very much niche or self inflicted scenarios. Not the "I could not get the shot" type.

Set up a nice JPG setting for later PP in a user mode and all this should be fine for many/most.

Yup, that's my preferred workaround than crop mode, for example when using the Brenizer technique, I have that set to Jpg as I need to fire off some panorama shots around the main subject relatively quickly, it doesn't work too well for me doing that in RAW mode.

Sadly I have a concert tomorrow night, so RAW mode is advantageous. I get around my buffer issues by having a second shooter to pick up and use whilst the K-1 is catching up with itself. Like i said, it's really only applicable to a rare few certain scenarios where I encounter buffering, happens like 5% of my shooting time.

It does mention a few catches to be aware of before upgrading.
- the CIPA battery life will decrease from 760 to 670
- the FPS in crop mode will reduce from 6.5 to 6.4
- RAW processing will be applied by the accelerator following the upgrade

Itís good to be transparent about these things up front. Looks like the actual upgrades will start from July.

To develop a K-1 RAW into a K-1 II, quite likely - as it's just software. But the development effort is better put elsewhere.
To "apply the accelerator unit", highly unlikely; the accelerator unit is processing the image data before it's reaching the PRIME processor. And I don't believe it's just the kind of software NR one could apply later (who knows what kind of noise sources it can identify and compensate for...).

Business logic suggests even if they could have done (I am not suggesting they could have), they shouldn’t have done. Rather, they should have intentionally engineered a hardware solution so people would pay for it. They’re in the business of selling cameras and lenses, not engineering major utility improvements that are implemented through free Firmware updates (not at the $1,999 price point anyway).

The clever upgrade path is actually a unique, customer-friendly solution.

It's not the buffer that is the problem. The bottle neck is the SD card slots UHS-I speed that is the problem. The K-1 files are to large for UHS-I to handle them. It's really simple math. The 50+mb RAW files can not transfer fast enough through the 40mb/s UHS-I throughput speeds.

But isn't that specifically what buffers are for? Decoupling the speed of the camera sensor dump from the write speed of an SD card is what the buffer does. If you doubled the size you would expect nearly double the number of frames before the buffer filled up and you were limited to SD card write out speeds - paralyzed waiting for the buffer to clear. How practical is adding that much buffer? I personally have no idea what size is there and what power requirements are entailed and I'm unclear even if there is sufficiently dense memory available to fill the space available with significantly more buffer or not.

Ideally sure a faster storage option, maybe with dual buses to write to two cards simultaneously? But that's for a future camera I suspect.